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1970s — 1987
The Rivergreenway began as citizens, not as a city department. In the 1970s — the late 1970s, in the City's own later telling — a diverse group of citizens from the public and private sectors in Fort Wayne and Allen County met to form the Rivergreenway Consortium, with a single large goal: to plan and develop a linear park along the banks of the city's three rivers that would extend from county line to county line. The 2001 study of the trail prepared by Indiana University's Eppley Institute states the formation the same way, and the consortium was still meeting monthly — the second Thursday of every month, at the Fort Wayne Parks and Recreation Department — when that study was written. The group is also called the Greenway Consortium in many later accounts, including the record of its 2011 merger; both names name the same body, and this section uses the earlier form. (See the Fort Wayne Trails entry below.)
Trail construction began in 1975, the Eppley Institute's 2017 Indiana Trails Study states, and by 1987 nine miles of the Rivergreenway had been completed. The two statements sit in some tension — a consortium organized late in the decade and construction begun in 1975 — and the record as reached does not reconcile them; what is documented is that building was under way in the decade and that nine miles stood by 1987. Much of the Rivergreenway was funded by the State of Indiana and the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund. The ground itself was flood ground: the paths were laid along riverbanks the city already held as levees, dikes and flood-prone park land, which is why the greenway could be assembled in a working river city at all — and why, as the floods entry below records, parts of it go under water to this day. By 2001 the trail had grown to a fifteen-mile linear park, in the Eppley study's count, with, in the consortium's efforts as the study credits them, nearly fifteen miles of city-owned and forty miles of county-owned paths, overlooks, boardwalks, pedestrian underpasses and landscaping projects created over the consortium era.
Sources: Eppley Institute for Parks and Public Lands, A Study of the Rivergreenway Trail in Ft. Wayne, Indiana (30 Nov 2001) — consortium formed in the 1970s by public- and private-sector citizens; county-line-to-county-line goal; fifteen-mile trail; "nearly fifteen miles of city owned and forty miles of county owned paths" created; monthly meetings continuing. Eppley Institute, 2017 Indiana Trails Study: Fort Wayne Rivergreenway (31 May 2018) — "Trail construction began in 1975. By 1987, nine miles of the Rivergreenway had been completed"; funding by the State of Indiana and the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund. The Waynedale News, "Mayor Richard's Second Greenway Summit" (7 Dec 2005) — "in the late 1970s a group of concerned citizens from both the private sectors in Fort Wayne and Allen County met to form the Greenway Consortium." Northeastern Indiana Regional Coordinating Council, Transportation Times, Spring 2026 — "The Greenway Consortium (organized in the 1970s)."